On Friday, I will fly home for two nights to celebrate my daughter’s birthday. I made a promise to her after missing her first and second birthdays that I would not miss another and thanks to the beards, I will head home on Friday and providing Ryan Air doesn’t fly me into a mountain or poison me with their in-flight sandwiches, I will return Sunday morning to the ship.
(more…)
I have done many boring things in my life. I’ve seen the musical Mamma sodding Mia. I have played Scrabble. I’ve sat through a three-hour training session on board about safety shoes and how to pick up a box. I have been in an all-day marketing meeting where beards utter words like “blue sky thinking” and “raising ideas up the flagpole and seeing which way the wind blows” and I have watched Sex and the City 1 and 2. I am therefore an expert on boredom and how deeply it can affect my ability to stay calm and not want to poke my own eyes out with a toothpick. Some people are able to fall asleep when they are bored. But not me, I just get frustrated and for some reason when I check my sugar level and I am bored, it goes up. When I am bored, I get mad — mad at the man who dreamt up these ridiculous marketing words and the plonker who thought it would be a good idea that a movie about three women and a horse who live in New York and have rumpy pumpy with their bras on. (more…)
There are many ways in which you can tell you are getting old. The forest of hair in your nose and ears for example or those weird noises I make now as I get out of a chair or off a sofa ………. aggghoooo. However, these past few days I have experienced two situations that make me think that 47 is the new 73. Firstly, while at home last week a friend called me at 9:30pm and asked: “I didn’t wake you, did I?” Bloody hell! Is that what people think of me? Do they believe that I have just had a cup of cocoa and am in bed asleep, dreaming of a nice retirement home in the country at 9:30 at night? I felt like telling this friend who called that actually I was in the middle of “a little action,” but he would rather than think I meant some rumpy pumpy that a “little action” referred to a good bowel movement.
It’s Friday February 17 and its time to pay tribute to something that has slowly disappeared from the Promenade Decks and dining rooms of the Carnival fleet. No, not the sodding shrimp cocktail ……….the gentleman’s tuxedo. My first remembrance of the tuxedo or dinner jacket as it’s known in the land of spotted dick and Simon Cowell was when I hired one from a store called Moss Bros. It was for a posh party and my mate Alan and I thought it would be “cool” to wear a tuxedo. Turns out it wasn’t and we were the only two people wearing such attire and to the other party goers we didn’t look cool at all. We looked like total and utter plonkers and we might as well have stood there wearing baggy underpants…… because the girls ignored us. We ended up drowning our sorrows with cheap wine and the next day I returned my hired tuxedo to the store explaining to the man on the returns desk that it was covered in vomit when I rented it.
(more…)
Just before I left home for the Carnival Magic my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Kye discovered the word “why.” “Don’t throw Dadda’s cell phone in the toilet” ……..”Why?” is her response. And judging by what happened to me last night at the captain’s celebration I only have even more to worry about from her in the future. You see I was standing with the captain and senior officers when two bloggers approached me and at this point let me say a big hello to Jodie and Tom Marshall and their five-year-old son Brady. As we were chatting and talking about the blog and Facebook and their cruise, Brady, who was obviously bored, pulled on his father’s sleeve and pointing at me asked “Why is he so fat?”
(more…)
As you will see, we will be talking about the Miami office later and indeed we shall start with some office chat as well. Now I haven’t worked in an office for 25 years. The only time I did was when I first started work for Customs and Excise Branch 1AQ. That sounds fantastic doesn’t it? (more…)
Wow, what a difference from last cruise. I will show you the stats in a moment but we have gone from 1,000 children to just 91. And the guests are much older as well and with that in mind have a read of this:
Guest: Mrs. ________ Ref: 941285541A
Cabin: —— Booking#: _______ Added-Changed: 09/05/11 – 09/05/11SHOW TOO LOUD
Mrs.______ came to the GSD to say that her husband and she had left the show tonight because it was too loud. Guest was very upset and said that she wanted to meet with the cruise director as she wants the volume lowered for all the shows.
Ketut has been sick these past two days and I have missed him so much. For those who do not know who Ketut is, I should explain that he is my cabin steward and cleans and tidies my cabin, looks after me, scrapes various objects off the inside of my toilet and washes my underpants. I have no idea what made him sick, but he has been confined to bed by the ship’s doctor for two days and I am lost without him. (more…)
“So, how is this cruise going?” I hear you cry. It’s going very well and thanks for asking. I won’t say that there aren’t challenges and I will be discussing one or two of those over the next few blogs starting today with an old chestnut. But overall the guests love the ship and her crew. There are 4,400 guests here which means there are going to be as there always is, one or two ummmmm……….interesting stories. (more…)
So being the brave soul that I am, I decided to hold a live Question and Answer session after my travel talk and after telling the guests last week that Jose and his mates were on strike and that we were not going to Palma De Mallorca but spending an overnight in Barcelona instead. I was ready and prepared for the onslaught to begin and had a crack security team standing by in case things turned ugly…..OK……..my crack security team consisted of Calvyn who is to security what Richard Simmons is to cage fighting. (more…)
